Lately I have been busy making custom watch face images for my Apple Watch 42mm. Retro computing type faces. Fun.
Something I quickly encountered in making these faces and testing them on the watch, going back and editing, etc. is the situation with the time and date text shadow that watchOS 2 placed under those white characters.
There are two (at least) levels of shadowing that watchOS uses, depending on the image the user chooses.
I made my first face and things went as expected; the subtle text drop shadow was there and all looked fine and as I anticipated.
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It was on my second face that I noticed the entire upper portion of the image had a shadow gradient applied to it, a gradient that was not present on my first watch face.
![]()
Confused, I tried changing the white menu bar to light grey, darkening the green, but the shadow kept appearing when loaded as a custom face. I then added two additional rows / lines of black pixels at the top of the image (sliding everything down two pixels). That did it -- a much shallower shadow under the white clock text alone is present.
![]()
Great, so its all about watchOS 2 sampling the top rows of the image to determine how much shadow is needed. Or so I thought. The face I'm working on now has the same kind of white menu bar at the top, though taller. I applied the 3 rows of black pixels at the top of the image, but I get the strong shadow this time around...
![]()
I want to make many more faces, for fun, but it would be helpful to know exactly how watchOS 2 is determining which shadow effect to use. This would take some real time to discover through minute iteration testing.
Is the method used by the OS outlined exactly in the developer documentation? Does anyone know more than I've presented here?
Thanks.
bp
Something I quickly encountered in making these faces and testing them on the watch, going back and editing, etc. is the situation with the time and date text shadow that watchOS 2 placed under those white characters.
There are two (at least) levels of shadowing that watchOS uses, depending on the image the user chooses.
I made my first face and things went as expected; the subtle text drop shadow was there and all looked fine and as I anticipated.
It was on my second face that I noticed the entire upper portion of the image had a shadow gradient applied to it, a gradient that was not present on my first watch face.
Confused, I tried changing the white menu bar to light grey, darkening the green, but the shadow kept appearing when loaded as a custom face. I then added two additional rows / lines of black pixels at the top of the image (sliding everything down two pixels). That did it -- a much shallower shadow under the white clock text alone is present.
Great, so its all about watchOS 2 sampling the top rows of the image to determine how much shadow is needed. Or so I thought. The face I'm working on now has the same kind of white menu bar at the top, though taller. I applied the 3 rows of black pixels at the top of the image, but I get the strong shadow this time around...
I want to make many more faces, for fun, but it would be helpful to know exactly how watchOS 2 is determining which shadow effect to use. This would take some real time to discover through minute iteration testing.
Is the method used by the OS outlined exactly in the developer documentation? Does anyone know more than I've presented here?
Thanks.
bp